


Live and Let Die

by The Doorman (Neo)



Category: DCU, Red Hood and the Outlaws
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 21:34:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neo/pseuds/The%20Doorman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a time Jason wanted to be angry forever, but it's true that all things eventually change with age. It only stands to reason that he and Bruce would someday too. Bruce, as always, is the last person to figure that stuff out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Live and Let Die

**Author's Note:**

> This is new continuity! New continuity gave me Jason wearing the red bat. I can't be too mad.

The first time Jason became fully aware of the fact that there were other universes out there, other Jasons and other Batmen, he’d sat awake the night afterwards and massaged his temples for about three hours straight trying not to think of the possibilities. 

That’s all he has, though, when it comes to Bruce—possibilities.

Somewhere he didn’t die. He’s almost positive this is a place where it’s just him and Bruce, living happily ever after. Or at least until the old man croaked, at which point he’d slap on the ears and cowl for himself and eventually lose his goddamn mind.

Somewhere Bruce kills the Joker, and there’s a chance that it’s _great_ , but Jason hates to admit that he might know better. Maybe Bruce can’t kill just one without killing the rest. Maybe Bruce flips a shit and Jason has to drag him back from the brink over and over. This universe, too, ends in Jason losing his freaking mind. And probably his hair. From the stress.

Somewhere _he_ kills the Joker. Fuck, why hasn’t he done it already? Damian’s gotten away with it. He figures that’s what they mean when they say younger siblings get it easier.

Somewhere Jason doesn’t make a hobby of putting broken things back together and keeps pissing in Bruce’s cornflakes as a full-time job. Whenever he thinks of this universe, his brain kind of itches with something that resembles déjà vu, but the feeling slips out from between his fingers like water. 

It’s probably for the best anyway, because fixating on Bruce always leaves Jason reaching for the aspirin. That’s what Bruce Wayne is right now, and that’s all he is. He’s a giant headache in a giant bat-shaped case.

He’s also right above Jason, doing a better impression of a gargoyle than an actual gargoyle.

Jason points as peaceably as he can while holding a two-handed rifle. “We gotta stop _meeting_ like this,” he says, almost playfully. Mostly he’s pissed.

Bruce says, “I’ve been on this case for two weeks—”

“You’ve been riding my ass for two weeks, you mean.”

Bruce slinks down the side of the brownstone. “The details are more than they appear.”

Jason scratches his neck with the barrel of the gun and tries not to laugh at how that makes Bruce _wince_. “Did my homework,” he said. “Got a ‘B’ for ‘blow this guy’s head off’. Or do you wanna sit and compare notes?”

It’s pitch black on this stoop but Jason knows that face too well not to see when a light goes on behind it. “It would be prudent to—”

“For the love of fuck, Bruce,” Jason sighs, strapping the rifle to his back and shooting his grapple westward, “you grew up with Alfred, you should have a _doctorate_ in sarcasm by now—”

Bruce doesn’t follow him, thank god.

 

*

 

In another universe, Bruce probably does follow him. Jason thinks about that one while he’s reviewing the briefing _he_ was given, combing it for holes. 

He thinks about this stuff the way that one bullshit factoid claims teenage boys think about sex. Every seven or so seconds, given the lack of anything better to do, his brain takes a slow crawl up the twisted cedar that is his relationship with Bruce and examines every brittle branch.

Bruce follows him. They talk about the case, all clipped tones and ten-words-or-less. Jason pokes fun, mean fun. Bruce ignores the bait.

Bruce leaves. Things stay the same.

It sounds dull. In truth it’s a marked improvement over how things used to be, back when Jason woke up every night with his teeth bared, his hands flailing midair at the fading flashes of a dream wherein they were wrapped tight around Bruce’s neck.

He imagines that maybe this is how all sons feel about their estranged fathers—pouring out all that piping-hot rage, then trying to forge a weapon out of it when it cools. Or maybe a suit of armor.

But then, he reasons, flipping to another sheet in the manila folder, most sons probably didn’t wake up from their dad-killing dreams with a boner.

 

*

 

Four months pass. Bruce bumps into him at the grocery store.

Jason makes a point of ignoring him, but Bruce keeps ending up on the opposite side of whatever section he’s checking out. Cauliflower. Fresh-baked donuts. Samples of little crackers with salsa on them.

Finally Jason ducks into the bread section, at which point Bruce gives up his little one-man play.

“Jason,” he says.

Jason puts down his basket. “You’re faking _grocery shopping_. Is there a bomb under city hall that can only be defused with my thumbprint?”

Bruce stares him down. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For your restraint.”

“You know you could just...” Jason makes a little telephone gesture with his hand.

“You should come for dinner.”

That brings Jason’s train of thought to a halt. That line usually runs twenty hours a _day_.

“Please,” Bruce adds. His voice is so low and gravelly that Jason knows if he closes his eyes, he’ll hear Batman and not Bruce Wayne.

Jason doesn’t close his eyes, though. His first instinct is to snarl and snap, like an agitated gator in the marsh. His second is to leave without a word.

There’s another instinct too, just beneath the surface of his skin, that threatens to gobble the first two right up if he’s not careful.

He slips his toe beneath his shopping basket and kicks it back up into his hand with a whistle. “Sorry, old man, gonna have to take a raincheck. Places to go, people to...well, you know.”

For emphasis he puts on one of his cruel faces and makes another little hand gesture, a two-fingered bang-bang at his own temple. 

Bruce winces again, just like that night, and doesn’t stop him when he leaves.

 

*

 

In one universe, the hidden instinct that Jason has to dredge up and rebury every so often like a dog with a bone is the instinct to throw himself into Bruce’s arms and freak the hell out. This universe feels pretty remote, though. He’s not a kid anymore, and he’s long past looking for absolution in the crook of the Bat’s shadowy elbow.

In the one Jason actually inhabits, the instinct is a lot worse. 

He only really takes the time to examine it a month later, all alone in a bathhouse in Taiwan, far away from Gotham. He breathes in the slight smell of salt and the sweat rising from his own skin, then immerses himself up to his nostrils in the water.

He’d done this with Bruce, too. Bruce took him to Japan on a business trip. Washed his hair in dutiful, paternal silence, letting Jason’s snide culture shock roll off of his shoulders in waves.

He recognizes what Tim and Damian get from Bruce as something _he_ used to get from Bruce, and as something all fathers are wont to pass onto their sons: a dire, pathological hunger for their approval.

Somewhere in between dying and living again, the pathological hunger was replaced wholesale. Time healed some wounds and poked open fresh ones beneath the topmost layer of his skin.

Oh, sure, Jason’s always wanted to hurt Bruce. Wants to kick the ever-living shit out of him, in fact. He wants to wrap his fingers around Bruce’s throat and squeeze, wants to push bruises into every inch of the man with his fingers. Tear Bruce up with teeth and hands, like an animal. Shove Bruce down, force his dick into Bruce’s mouth.

He shudders.

“Christ,” he says out loud to the empty bath. “You could wallpaper a house with my therapy bills.”

 

*

 

He decides to avoid Bruce. No Bruce, no “grocery runs,” no invitations back to Wayne Manor. None of that crap. He’s got _work_.

Roy comes over to Gotham between missions, laying low after an undercover job in Tijuana and looking for chitchat.

“Nice bachelor pad,” Roy says, kicking his stuff under the bed. “I know I’ve said it before, but damn.”

“Thanks,” Jason says, running a dishrag down the length of another assault rifle. “You should try not being homeless. It does a lot for your range of hobbies.”

“Hey, you’re not a bad hobby.”

Jason scrubs the lenses on the sights before taking a peek through them, watching as Roy ducks right into his field of vision, grinning ear-to-ear.

“Whatever you’re trying to do, you should stop trying to do it because you’re really shitty at it,” Jason says, but he puts the gun down anyway and heaves himself to his feet, backing Roy up against a wall.

Sucking Roy off is a simple affair. In between Roy’s cock in his mouth and all the gun-polishing he’s doing by himself in low fluorescent lighting, he’s starting to think, hey, he’s really getting the hang of this sublimation thing.

Roy grunts, throaty and happy. His fingers find their way into Jason’s hair, but Jason smacks them away immediately.

Roy doesn’t seem interested in putting up a fight. He just starts grinding into Jason’s mouth, making these little noises, slamming his palms up against the wall—

His stupid fingers somehow find the segment of wall that pushes in. Roy half-swivels around with a yelp as the wall opens up behind him, revealing a wall-to-wall glass enclosure.

Jason, still working his way around a mouthful of Roy, feels his left eye start twitching violently at the sight of all those vests. All his backup vests. Rows and rows of them. All those bright red Batman logos staring him right in the face while he’s got another guy’s dick in his mouth.

“Uh,” Roy says, “holy shit.”

Jason lets Roy’s dick slip from his mouth with a pop. “Never seen an armor cache before?” he asks.

“Of course I have,” Roy says, then shakes his head as if to shake off his brief confusion. “Just surprised me, that’s all—hey, where’re you going?”

Jason stands up and grabs his jacket. “Taking a walk.”

“W-what!?”

Jason smirks at him before pulling on his helmet. “There’s lotion in the cabinet,” he says, jerking a thumb towards the cabinet in question. “Get any on my bed and I’ll kill you.”

“Oh, _hell no_ , you cannot just—”

He makes sure to slam the door shut behind him.

 

*

 

Batman hacks Jason’s intercom. 

“Come to dinner,” he says, his voice clear as daylight over the sound of Jason’s motorcycle tearing up Detroit.

“Anything for _you_ , my liege,” Jason hisses flatly into his mouthpiece, dropping his head as bullets whizz just past his helmet. “Whatever whim of yours _shall_ I entertain next?”

“Jason.” There’s a crackle of static. “I’m trying to...”

“Bruce,” he says, “take a couple million out of those billions of dollars of yours and buy a clue, why don’t you? I’m a little—”

From around the next corner, a small array of Venusians on copped police bikes try to trap him between themselves and the human drug runners behind him. Jason reaches into his pocket for his gun, then spots a construction ramp to his immediate right leading into a vast, muddy lot. He decides to make a break for it.

“Little busy,” Jason says finally, hitting the brakes as he hits the mud on the far end of the street.

“Tim told me you two ate together.”

“They say middle children are the _worst_ tattletales,” Jason snaps. He pulls an uzi from his back pocket and aims at the Venusians as they hurl themselves from the ramp. They’re not good enough with the bikes. He’ll have a clear shot in a second—

“If you could find it within yourself to extend me the same courtesy, Jason,” Bruce says, with a testy little touch of _authority_.

Jason systematically executes the Venusians and shoves the mouthpiece so close to his lips he almost eats it, hissing over the sound of their bikes and bodies hitting the sludgy dirt. “Are you even listening to yourself? What year do you think this _is_? The HMS Give-Jason-Orders is so far out of the harbor, it capsized in the middle of the damn Pacific. No survivors.”

Bruce is silent on the line.

“That _daddy_ card won’t work on me, Brucey,” Jason says savagely, and, oh, that feels good to say out loud. “So neither will this family dinner crap. Not now, never again.”

“Never?” Bruce echoes. 

It sounds like a mechanical playback, but Jason can hear something haunted in the query. He grits his teeth. “Consider your angles,” he says finally. 

Then he crushes the piece between his fingertips.

There’s almost certainly a universe out there somewhere where Bruce _gets it_. For all Jason knows, that universe could be this one. 

Still. He isn’t in the habit of keeping his fingers crossed.

 

*

 

Back in Gotham, two weeks after Michigan, Jason busies himself just before sunrise by making weaponized automatic staplers. 

The knock on the door comes as a surprise. The retina scanner hooked to the peephole projects its synopsis on the wall just above Jason’s desk. He’s about to ready the stapler gun when he realizes who it is.

He taps a button under the desk and the door swings open without triggering any of the auto-firing mechanisms. Bruce—Batman steps in, a huge mass of black and gray shadows. He doesn’t blink when the door closes behind him.

Jason lays the staplers in a neat row in front of himself. “You know,” Jason says, “I actually put a special motion bomb under the floor calibrated specifically to the combination of your average weight over the past five years and mine, within two standard deviations.”

Batman glowers at him. Batman always glowers, though. “Murder-suicide?”

“Suicide? Me? Surely thou jest. You underestimate how badly I wanted to kill you before.”

Batman looks around.

“...and how much I want to kill you now, come to think of it,” Jason says, tapping his chin in thought.

Batman ignores that last part. It might be for the best, honestly. “You live here by yourself.”

“A man needs his space, right?”

At that, Batman lets out a heavy sigh and reaches up to push back his cowl. 

Jason feels his mouth go a little dry. Feels like years since he’s seen Bruce like this.

“Did I give you too much, or too little?” Bruce asks. Even with all the lights in the apartment brightening up his sour face, his eyes still look hooded.

Jason drops his gaze to the staplers. “I can’t answer that right now.”

“Those...new friends of yours—”

Jason slams his hand on the table. “There you go again with that daddy shit. Try _not_ being disingenuous here.”

Bruce makes a face. If he were anybody else, it would’ve looked like a pout.

He goes and sits down on Jason’s bed. At first he sits up very straight, all business, but then when Jason meets his eyes again something just gives way and his shoulders sink. He looks exhausted. Jason doesn’t think he knows what exhaustion _is_.

“Thank you,” Bruce says. “For letting me in.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He looks around. “How’s the rent?”

“High... I see what you did there. I’m not squatting.” He sees the corner of Bruce’s mouth flicker upwards and points at him. “Shut up. Don’t say you’re proud. Like I even _care_.”

“I’m not. I was, though.”

“What are you now?”

“Scared,” Bruce says bluntly. His eyes are _piercing_. Jason refuses to blink. “It feels like I’ve lost you a thousand times. Like I lose you again every day we don’t talk.”

Jason feels his jaw clench. His teeth are grinding without explicit permission. “We’re talking _now_ ,” he snaps. “Don’t get cocky, you pompous—”

“Can I take you to dinner?” Bruce cuts in.

It’s like somebody lit a stick of dynamite in Jason’s brain.

Jason stands up and crosses the room in three large steps, fisting his hand in Bruce’s collar and slamming a knee on the bed by Bruce’s hip. He watches Bruce’s throat move. Wants to bite right through his carotid. “Yeah,” he says, his voice harsh and ragged in his own ears, “yeah, you’re taking me to dinner—”

Bruce touches his hand to Jason’s hip, then to the red bat on Jason’s chest. He looks like he’s in shock.

“I want Italian,” Jason says, seizing Bruce’s collar with both hands and tearing it wide open down to the sternum where the armor begins. He leans in and _licks_ , relishing Bruce’s hitched breath, his shiver. “Wear a suit.”


End file.
